One way to pray is to make the Scriptures our own by putting them in the first person so that we see how they apply to us. Today let us do that with Psalm 91, the great Psalm of God's protection. God, you are my refuge, my fortress, my God in whom I trust. You will save me from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. You will cover me with your feathers and under your wings I will find refuge. Your faithfulness will be my shield and rampart. I will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. Although a thousand may fall at my side, ten thousand at my right hand, it will not come near me. I will only observe with my eyes and see the punishment of the wicked. I make the Most High my dwelling – the Lord, who is my refuge – and no harm will befall me, no disaster will come near my tent. He will command his angels concerning me to guard me in all my ways. They will lift me up in their hands so that I do not strike my foot against a stone. I will tread upon the lion and the cobra; I will trample the great lion and the serpent. Because I love the Lord He will rescue me. He will protect me because I acknowledge his name. I will call upon him and he will answer me. He will be with me in trouble. He will deliver me and honor me. He will give me long life and salvation.
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Last weekend I attended a conference titled "Women on the Front Lines." Two of the speakers, Patricia King and Clarice Fluitt, are not only pastors but professional motivational speakers. They combined preaching the Gospel with motivating the attendees to do something about it. This is ongoing evangelization at its finest. Many of the people there, like me, are in what might be called "the second half of life." Of course, we don't really know how long we are going to live, so we don't know exactly when our second half starts, but we can assume that at 50 we are beginning that second half. Both women urged us not to slow down, not to retire, not to think that our work with and for God is finished just because we are over 50. Patricia told us that at the age of 50 she had never written a book. Now she has written 35. She started her own publishing company and media enterprise after the age of 50. She is still creating, still dreaming, still going with God. She is enjoying her life, her children and her grandchildren. She plans to "die with her boots on" whenever God calls her home. But in the meantime she is actively pursuing the plans God has for her. For Reflection: Have I taken on a retirement mentality? Have I decided that God is through with me? Or that I am finished with God? Let us pray. God, I agree with your word, "I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11). I declare that I am strong in you and in the strength of your might and in your love. For John one of the marks of a true Christian is love. God is love. Jesus laid down his life out of love. We should love one another. And what is this love? It is more than a feeling; it is an action. "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth" (1 John 3:16-18). The early disciples lived this out. We read in Acts 2:44 that "(A)ll the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need." Today we find it hard to fathom that this can or even should be done. For Reflection: We who are fortunate may have no first-hand experience of poverty. We may only see pictures on TV of people who have nothing or who have lost everything. We may never have been through a hurricane, a tornado or even a job loss. Would we be willing to sell what we have in order to give to someone we don't know personally? Would we be willing to do it for a friend? Let us pray. Lord Jesus, I've never sold anything to help someone else. I'm not sure I have that quality of love, that level of love. But I'm willing to learn. We sin; we don't sin. We sin; we don't sin. It seems as though John goes back and forth on the issue. In 1 John 1:8 he says, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." In 1 John 3:6 he says, "No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him." What are we to do with these two verses? One interpretation is that in chapter 3 John means that Christians don't persist in sin. They don't continue to commit the same sin with no thought of repentance, confession, or change. The author of Hebrews seems to share this opinion in 10:26 when he writes, "If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left." When we are baptized, we receive grace to help keep us from sin. And God continues to give us this grace, this help along the path. If we use the grace we are given, and continue to ask for more help from the Holy Spirit, the habitual sins of our past should fall by the wayside. We continue to become more like Jesus every day. For Reflection: Do I have a persistent sin in my life? Have I repented and confessed it? God's grace is sufficient for any situation. Let us pray. Jesus, your grace is sufficient because you died for me. Your grace is sufficient because your mercies are new every morning. Your grace is sufficient because you are faithful and true. "Who are you?" It's a common enough question, but what is our answer? Is our first answer our name, our position, our job? Most often, I think, we answer who we are in the world's eyes, not in God's eyes, even though we know that God's designation is more important than the world's. The apostle John very clearly states that we are children of God. That is our primary and most important description. John does not expect that to be our only name though as is clear when he says, "(W)hat we will be has not yet been made known" (1 John 3:2). We are expected to grow in Christ to become more like him until the time when we see him face-to-face. After all, when we face him we don't want to be ashamed (1 John 2:28). We will want to have done something with what God gave us. Remember the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30. Everything we have comes from God and is to be returned to God in better shape or even multiplied. So who are we? We are children of God, stewards, anointed ones, blessed, gifted, conquerors, ambassadors. The list goes on and on. For Reflection: Who am I? How does God see me? What have I done with what God has given me? Let us pray. "We know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face, Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known" (1 Corinthians 13: 9-10, 12). Our dear friend John keeps challenging us in his first letter. Now he wants to talk to us about "the world". Again his words are strong. "Do not love the world or anything in the world. . . For everything in the world - the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does - comes not from the Father but from the world" (1 John 2:15-17). We know that God created the world and declared that everything he created was good. So what is it about the world that we should not love? Cravings refers to satisfying our physical desires; lust is the desire for and accumulation of things; boasting is pride as if we accomplish anything on our own. These things that John warned against are still prevalent today and still just as hard to overcome today. Perhaps more so. Today we have a feast for the eyes through all kinds of social media. Temptations are everywhere. And we don't necessarily have to partake of the offerings in order to sin. We just have to crave, to lust. We can do those things without leaving our favorite chair at home. Boasting can be about what we have accomplished or about what our children or grandchildren have accomplished; e.g., graduated from Harvard, makes six figures, vacationed on the Riviera. We hear these types of boasts all the time. But how often do we hear, "My grandson is such a Godly man." Or "My daughter is a woman after God's heart." For Reflection: Craving, lusting and boasting are ever-present temptations. Where is love for "the world" present in my life? Is there a way to eliminate or at least minimize whatever leads me into these sins? Let us pray. "You are my King and my God, who decrees victories for Jacob. Through you we push back our enemies; through your name we trample our foes. I do not trust in my bow, my sword does not bring me victory; but you give us victory over our enemies, you put our adversaries to shame. In God we make our boast all day long, and we will praise your name forever" (Psalm 44:4-8). Another of the many contrasts John draws in his first letter is that of the old command and the new command. In 1 John 2:7 he says, I'm not writing you a new command but an old one, yet it is a new command. So which is it? New or old? He means to say it is both old and new. Leviticus 19:18 reads, "Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord." (emphasis mine) Jesus said that we should love one another as he loved us, which is more than loving our neighbor as ourselves (John 13:34). Loving someone as God loves us goes far beyond loving someone as we love ourselves. In this way, Jesus' teaching is an old teaching with a new twist. It is a command of a greater magnitude. The Jewish hearers of Jesus' teaching would have noticed the change immediately. They had been taught to love only those who did good to them. But Jesus' teaching specifically went beyond even loving our neighbors when he proclaimed, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:43). So the teaching of Jesus progressed from the old command to "love your neighbor as yourself" to "love your neighbor as I love you" to "love your enemies". Changing from "love your neighbor" to "love your enemy" indeed makes it a new command. Undoubtedly this is one of the hardest teachings of Jesus to accept and try to practice. For Reflection: As Christians, how are we doing at loving our neighbors? How are we doing at loving our enemies? Perhaps we need to ask ourselves, "Who is my enemy?" Today I hear people in the U.S. speak of "those republicans" or "those democrats" as if they are the enemy. Or we speak of unnamed terrorists or ISIS or Al Quaeda as the enemy. Yet Paul says we wrestle not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12). So who, indeed, is our enemy? Let us pray. Jesus, I seek to follow your command to love my enemies and pray for, or do good to, those who persecute me. Who have I been treating as my enemy? I ask you to help me see them through your eyes. I need help praying for them and not against them. "The man . . . is a liar and the truth is not in him." Strong words from Apostle John speaking in general of someone who says he knows God yet does not obey God's commands (1 John 2:3-5). John also calls out another type of liar: "Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist -- he denies the Father and the Son" (1 John 2:22). Again, these are such strong words from John. But in a way they tell us what a Christian must profess and do. A Christian must know that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed Son of God and must follow in the footsteps of Christ. A Christian must walk the walk. And how do we walk the walk? We follow the example of Jesus and we do whatever specific things God calls us to do. Following his example means caring about people, offering loving service and giving witness to God the Father. It is not so difficult to know what Jesus did because we can read the Bible to find out. But many have trouble knowing exactly what God is calling them specifically to do. This calls for prayer and listening. Jesus also prayed and listened to the Father. He often went off to a quiet place to pray. If even Jesus needed to pray, to seek the Father's face, how much more do we need to do the same? For Reflection: How often and how earnestly do I pray and seek God's direction for my life? If I need to do more, it needs to be scheduled. When will it be? Let us pray. Jesus, I know you went off alone to pray all the time. I need to do the same. Please show me the opportunities in my day when I can spend a little time with you and the Father. I don't want to be the liar who says one thing and does another. I want to be your true witness. I want to follow in your footsteps and listen to the Father's directions. John continues to speak of sin, truth and lies in chapter two of his first letter. He has already spoken of confessing our sins (1:9) to Jesus who is faithful and just. Then he goes on to say that Jesus is the Righteous One, the atoning sacrifice. He is the one who serves as our defense lawyer before the Father. In fact, he is the only one who can represent us before the Father because it was his sacrifice of his own life that leads to our justification. It is his justification, his righteousness which is applied to our sin before the Father. And so, we are declared "not guilty" because he took our guilt, our sin, our shame upon himself. He is our defense (2:1-2). He is a better defense attorney than Johnny Cochran. He argues in a court far above the Supreme Court. And he always wins. For Reflection: Justification is the forgiveness of sins (cf. Rom 3:23-25; Acts 13:39; Lk 18:14), liberation from the dominating power of sin and death (Rom 5:12-21) and from the curse of the law (Gal 3:10-14). It is acceptance into communion with God: already now, but then fully in God's coming kingdom (Rom 5:1f). It unites with Christ and with his death and resurrection (Rom 6:5). It occurs in the reception of the Holy Spirit in baptism and incorporation into the one body (Rom 8:1f, 9f; I Cor 12:12f). All this is from God alone, for Christ's sake, by grace, through faith in "the gospel of God's Son" (Rom 1:1-3). (Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by Faith, 11, www.vatican.va) Let us pray. Jesus, you are the only begotten Son of the Father. You are the Righteous One, the Just One. You are the one who intercedes for us. You are the light. You are the truth. You are the atonement. "God is light" is the opening theme of 1 John (1:5). The light of God is contrasted with the darkness of Satan, sin and evil. God is pure light. In him there is no darkness at all. If there is darkness in us, then we are not in the pure light of God. The pure light is the truth; darkness is a lie. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, as Romans 3:23 tells us. If we claim not to have sinned, then we are liars. The pure light of God is sinlessness and it is truth. All else has some measure of darkness, sin and fabrication. Since we are not perfect, not pure, then we have elements of darkness, sin and falsehood within us. However, if we confess our sins, God will forgive us and purify us. This is a great promise - like a "get out of jail free" card. If we but sincerely repent and confess our sins, God will forgives us. It's not that he might forgive us, or probably he will forgive us, but he will forgive us. It's a sure thing. God will take us out of the darkness and bring us back into the light. He sets us free from our bad choices. Thus begins John's argument against those who would deny the reality of sin (1 John 1:5-10). Sin is real and it is present in all of us. If we think it is not, we deceive ourselves. For Reflection: Have I been thinking that I am past all that sinning "stuff?" I'm too good to sin now. If so, how did this lie get into my thinking? Let us pray. Blessed be your glorious name, and may it be exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you" (Nehemiah 9:5b-6). |
AliceI started this website and blog on May 1, 2012. I am a Catholic who has been in ministry for many years. I first developed what I would call a close relationship with Jesus in the early 1970s. Ever since then I have been praying with people for healing and other needs. It is because I have seen so many of these prayers answered that I am so bold as to offer to pray for you individually through this website and phone line. Archives
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